In 2005 the voters fought back in a Texas school district.
School bond formula faltering - (worried school construction companies campaign for votes)
Taxpayers fought back: Winning enough votes for multimillion-dollar school building programs used to be easy for school districts that followed a few simple rules:
•Schedule the election on a day when there's nothing else on the ballot, ensuring low voter turnout;
•Hit up school construction companies for campaign donations and spend the money on big newspaper ads and yard signs;
•Use school buildings for polling locations and encourage teachers and parents to vote.
It worked perfectly for the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District's $713 million bond election Dec. 11, in the middle of the holiday season. School construction companies and other Cy-Fair vendors gave more than $70,000 to Citizens for Cy-Fair Bonds. Voter turnout was 4 percent, and the measure passed handily with 75 percent of the vote.
The people who run the Spring schools did all those things before last weekend's vote on a $385 million bond proposal that included eight new schools, a competition swim center and a laptop computer for every high school student. It would have cost the typical homeowner an extra $100 next year and $200 the year after.
But when the ballots were counted, Spring ISD voters had handed the school district a lopsided beating by a 3-1 ratio. Voter turnout was 10 percent, high for a bond election…..”
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The way to slap down these bond election tax hikes???
More VOTERS need to show up. DON'T leave it to someone else because the SOMEONE ELSE voting are UNION members dead set on picking you clean!
Feb 26, 2011: First blow to Emanuel team (transition aide quits after ethics violation revealed)
[excerpt] "[Judy] Erwin, the former executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, admitted using her office e-mail and phone while working on a campaign committee for presidential candidate Barack Obama, using staff resources to plan her trip to the 2008 Democratic National Convention and engaging in campaign fundraising activity while on the job, the state's Executive Ethics Commission ruled in a decision filed Feb. 16.
.....The inspector general investigation found that Erwin repeatedly violated the state prohibition on political activity between July 2008 and February 2009 and "co-opted" her staff by involving them in her activities. "The atmosphere for IBHE [Illinois Board of Higher Education] employees must have been heavily colored by Ms. Erwin's political activity on the job," the ethics board said. It found "particularly troubling" her explanation that she made a campaign contribution to a state representative who was the chairman of the higher education appropriations committee: "This suggests that she was responding to a real or imagined pay to play incentive within state government."
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Her punishment??? (Will she lose her pension from her 30 years employed by state government????)
[excerpt] "The ethics commission said she cooperated with the investigation by the executive inspector general, reimbursed the state, agreed to pay a $4,000 fine and promised to never work for the state again. She resigned Aug. 15.
... "We had not seen the decision," Emanuel spokesman Ben LaBolt told the Tribune late Friday. "Judy Erwin is a friend of Rahm's with a wealth of experience and he'll continue to consult her public policy knowledge." [end excerpt]
My guess is the work was so shoddy as it was done by either unions or illegal aliens.
Or maybe both.
Democracy is a bad form of government that uses a massive PR campaign to convince us that a candidate should get office because he/she shares the goals and aspirations of the majority of the electorate. What we are seeing playing out in this instance and Wisconsin and elsewhere is that even as bad as Democracy may be, governance by unelected bureaucrats is worse.
The larger government gets (a DEMOCRAT PARTY GOAL), the more removed our elected officials become from the actual role of governing. The faceless bureaucrat managing other bureaucrats takes the written laws and translate them into regulations and semi-decipherable language in the law books and then enforces them.
SIZE MATTERS and in this case of our civil masters, we need to bring them to heel. Large government is almost always incompetent government because they are not spending their own money and as such they fall prey to crooks and flim-flam contractors. It is the very nature of the beast and if we don’t stop it now we will face the whirlwind.
Voters better wake up and realize that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that this sort of racket is being perpetrated all over our country.
Sounds normal. Waste, fraud and abuse doesn’t produce firings, arrests and jail time but it does bring exposes’, excuses and demands for more money.....Yep, just normal.
I've been in Commercial Construction in the Chicago Metro Area for 41 years now. I went from 'low;y Draftsman' (/s), to 'practical engineer'(1), Project Manager and Chief Estimator. I have been involved in the construction of everything from 54 Story High Rise buildings (57 with the Mechanical Penthouse), to small additions for a Village city hall - and NEVER heard of something as completely messed up as this.
The things mentioned in the article are almost unbelievable. I'm 'series'. If one went on a mission to sabotage these projects you couldn't do all these things if you tried.
And I don't blame the Trade Unions. Every person goes through a long apprenticeship - except Laborers, and the Union work is TOP NOTCH. They DO take pride in their finished work. And the Main Contractor mentioned in the article is no dummy, I've worked with them and they are experts at Construction Management, and tough SOBs if you fall behind or your work, or it doesn't meet the Spec's. (NOTE: the Trade Unions are not the SEIU hacks)
So if anything, it has to go back to The School Board and the individual College Administrators. But someone should have stopped their nonsense pdq, like the Architect(s). After the 'Owner', it's the Arch who is the ultimate Boss. And trust me - they let you know it!
So I really am at a loss how these things could happen. In the Chi Metro Area I know they wouldn't. And that's a fact.
(1) 'Practical Engineer' is (was) a Chicago term. It's used (or was) for people who've learned Mech Engineering on their own w/ OJT. They just don't have that sheepskin that says BSME (I've always been embarrassed to use/say it).
ps; The charge of nepotism mentioned in the article is a straw man IMO. The Construction Trades are a tight community as there's only so many contractors. People recommend 'put a word in' for each other, or friends and relations, all the time. It is not illegal.
“And the landmark clock tower leaned to one side” - ummm...would that be to the left?
How does having a grand entry plaza and clock tower improve student learning?
The plaza and tower were built because the government has the police power to take the money for it from the citizen.
As you drive by any government building ask yourself, “If that were a private business, doing similar work, what would the building look like?”
Think about the type of work that is actually done within the:
legislatures
courts
schools
libraries
Answer: If the above were private business this work would probably be located in very modest offices that look like very ordinary industrial park buildings!
The government's business is not done in modest building because they have the police power to take the money from the citizen. Business can't do that.
Oh...Isn't it amazing that our oldest and most prestigious universities manage to lovingly keep up and use modest buildings that are 200 or more years old? Yet...Our county had to have a new $70 million dollar taj mahal for its high school students and a building that is a mere 50 years old now sits vacant.